ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
There is in New York City a great building seven hundred and fifty feet high. It has fifty-three stories, and provides business homes for ten thousand persons.
If you had watched it rise from story to story, you would have been amazed at the tons of cable running from the basement towards the roof. You would have exclaimed in wonder over the miles upon miles of wire that extended from room to room. Suppose you had asked the purpose of these wires and cables. Do you know what the answer would have been? You would have been told that they were placed there so a person in any room of the building could talk to some one in any other room within the towering walls; to any one outside in the great city, and even to persons far away in Chicago and St. Louis. Then you would have said, “Of course, they are telephone wires.”
You use the telephone often, do you not? Probably if you were asked to say how many times you had talked over the telephone in your life, you would have to reply, “More than I can remember.”
Let us think about the messages we send along the telephone wires from day to day. They are for the most part of two kinds. We have friendly talks with persons we know well, and we give brief business orders at office and shop.
But if we were gunners in the army of our country we should be told by telephone just when, where, and how 30 we were to fire our guns. We would not see our target, but would shoot according to the directions of a commanding officer who knows what must be done and telephones his orders to us.
If we were acting with hundreds of persons in a great scene for a motion picture film, we should be told what to do by a man called the director. He could not make us all hear if we were out of doors and scattered about in groups, but he would telephone orders to his helpers. One of these would be with each large crowd of actors. Perhaps the telephones would be hanging on the side of a tree or set up in rude fashion on a box. Nevertheless, that would not interfere with their use and we should receive directions over them to do our part in the scene then being photographed.
These uses seem wonderful to us, but each year sees the telephone helping man more and more in strange and powerful ways. It is likely that we have just begun to know a little of what this great invention can do for us.